Dr. Peter Horsfield is an ordained minister in the
Uniting Church in Australia. He is currently employed on the Electronic
Culture Research Project, a special initiative of the Uniting Church's
Commission in Victoria to explore the impact of electronic media on global
cultures and the implications of this cultural change on religious institutions
and on the social experience and expression of religious faith. For ten
years previously he was the Dean of the Uniting Church's Theological Hall
and Lecturer in Practical Theology in the United Faculty of Theology in
Melbourne. He has published extensively in the areas of mass communication
and society and media, religion and culture. Among his publications are
two books: Religious Television: The American Experience (Longmans 1984)
and Taming the Television: A Parents' Guide to Children and Television
(Albatross 1986). The following article was published in The Covenant Quarterly, Vol. LIV, No. 3 (August 1996), pp. 26-37.

The communication situation today

The development of electronic technologies for storing and transferring
information in the past two generations has been exponential. Things are
now being done in electronic communication which once would have been thought
impossible.

These developments have changed not only the speed and way in which
we now communicate: they have also changed the way our societies are organised,
how we relate to each other, what we think is important, and how we think
and expect our social institutions (including the church) to function.

It is my contention that the mass media have become so integrated and
extensive - technologically, economically and socially - that they have
gone beyond being just instruments for social communication. The mass media
together have shaped a new international culture and ideology whose web
now touches, influences and in some cases dominates every other cultural
system.

In previous times we lived and worked within the context of the natural
environment. Today the environment within which most of us live and work
is a media environment, an over-arching web of mediated symbols, processes,
stories and values that surrounds, gives shape to, and interprets most
things we do as individuals and as a society. While the natural world is
still there, touching us through the seasons and weather, natural disasters
and occasional recreation, the natural world is no longer the major thing
with which we contend. The world that has greater impact on our decision-making,
value formation, relationships and self-perception is the technological-mediated
world, not the natural world.

The broader dimensions of this change are significant. The world of
nature, because of its grandeur and sense of uncontrollability, carried
with it the "suspicion" that there is something greater than
us, something with which we need to contend. This greatness of nature traditionally
has been a significant foundation for our understanding of God. Paul alludes
to this in Romans: "(Godís) eternal power and divine nature, invisible
though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has
made. So they are without excuse; for though they knew God, they did not
honour him as God or give thanks to him." (Romnot only absent, God
is not necessary. The "otherness" we experience in this world
is seeing something awesome that makes us feel humble; it is the disequilibrium
we feel when we see others with things that we donít have. "Mystery"
in the media likewise is not an experience of awe and humility: it is an
experience of technological curiosity ("How did they do that?")
or functional strategy ("How can I get it?").

This is not to say that people have become totally submissive to a technological/consumer
world-view: we are not robots to a technological pre-determinism. But it
is important to understand that the actual world in which we live, not
just the immediate processes we live by, has changed in the last three
decades and this change is influencing the way we see things and make decisions
and judgments.

The relevance of the Bible

In what ways can the Bible, a book from a largely agricultural, pre-industrial,
and pre-electronic culture, have any bearing on how we should live and
work out our faith in such a global media-dominated culture today? It is
important that we find a way of practically connecting the Bible and our
media culture, otherwise we run several risks.

First, there is the risk of separating private faith and devotion from
public decision making and ethical behaviour. Because the Bible doesnít
speak directly about the mass media, it can be easy to see the Bible as
the authority for the personal aspects of our lives and then simply assume
that people who are good personally will automatically know how to be good
publicly or corporately. That is not a correct assumption.

Second, we run the risk of seeing the Bible as relevant only for those
forms of communication that were known in biblical times. There are a number
of excellent books, for example, which give a biblical account of communication,
without saying anything about technological communication.

A third risk is that we select out bits of the Bible that suit our ideas
about mass media but ignore other parts that would challenge those ideas.
When someone says "This is what the Bible says about Christian use
of mass media," it generally says as much about the context and agenda
of the person doing the interpreting as it does about the biblical message.
For example, the Bible is frequently quoted in support of opposition to
portrayals of sex and violence in the media but not often to challenge
the practice of western media corporations destroying poorer indigenous
cultures by selling cheap western entertainment that under-cuts local programming,
even though protection of the poor is a strong biblical message.

Making connections

How then can we make necessary connections between the Bible and modern
communications? My perspective is that there are a number of connections
that arise both from the issues that confront us as Christians living in
a mass media age and from the Bibleís insistent message.

1. The Biblical message supports a quality of communication that is
strongly personal-communal. The existence of things and people is an expression
of the personal quality of Godís justice-love and God actively seeks an
ongoing just and loving relationship with what is created. God encourages
this relationship to be robust and interactive involving qualities of comfort
and challenge, initiative and response, question and answer, closeness
and distance, lament and laughter, complaint and reassurance, defence and
vulnerability, on both sides. Even in revelation, God gives people the
freedom to participate, to see or not to see.

The supreme expression of this personal nature of Godís communication
is in the person, Jesus of Nazareth, the "Word made flesh" (John
1:14), whose nature was to liberate humans to their full humanity (Luke
4, etc) and to restore intimate relationship (communion) between creation
and God (II Cor 5:18-21).

Because it is a reflection of Godís nature and Godís way of doing things,
establishing, maintaining and developing full and robust relationships
between creation, God and people-in-community should be the quality that
characterises Christian communication.

This perspective should guide us in evaluating not just the content
of communication but also the method of communication. The central message
of the Christian gospel is that the method by which Godís redemptive love
was shown was not in sending an edited message or program, nor by sending
an inter-media-ry, but by being there personally in Jesus Christ, vulnerable
to our pain, desolation, disease, anger and retribution - in fact being
killed by it. The method by which we communicate as Christians has meaning,
not just the content of our communication.

2. Mass media are just one aspect within the whole spectrum of communication.
We have come to believe in the past two decades that mass media are the
most important, most influential and most necessary forms of communication.
We have come to this belief, not because of clear findings of research,
but because of the way in which technology and technological development
are revered, marketed and used within our society. The result is that for
many countries and organisations (and even churches) developing communication
is now understood mainly as buying new machines for processing information
or broadcasting programs.

Communication research indicates, however, that in many ways inter-personal
and group communication is still more effective for achieving understanding
of issues, conveying information and influencing decisions, and are more
enjoyed for relaxation and entertainment than are mass media. Inter-personal
communication is still the most effective means of evangelism. If we applied
a biblical perspective in assessing new technology, and if the same amount
of energy and resources had been devoted to the development of inter-personal
and community-based communication as have been devoted to technological
communication, we may have achieved a richer more satisfying alternative
way of living together.

3. Communication involves much more than just what we do as humans.
Communication is the breath (pneuma or spirit) of our common existence.
The world is dependent on and affected by inter-relationship (communication)
between all things - even animals and what we have thought to be inanimate
objects.

This is the biblical perspective of creation: that we are born into
a world that is given to us and not something of our own making (Genesis
1-2, Psalm 8); that humans have a place within it but not the place (Job
34:14-15); that the whole of this creation is interconnected and in constant
communication with itself in a complex way (Rom 8:29-23) and that nature
experiences destructive consequences as a result of human disobedience
of God (see for example Genesis 3, 1 Kings 17-18, Romans 8). Yet we have
gone ahead with development that breaks ecological chains, ignores complex
interrelationships between people, animals and things, and assumes that
human activity and progress can take place without consideration of other
aspects of creation.

4. The mass media reflect values that are challenged by biblical values.
Studies have shown for a number of decades that the mass media reflect
common patterns of underlying themes, motifs and values across different
media and a wide range of programming.

While Christians frequently take action in relation to specific objectionable
aspects of programming, what we have not yet addressed are the broader,
repetitive underlying values that are changing not just particular ideas
but the whole structure of our perception. These underlying "mythological"
patterns include, for example:

the inescapable requirement that things be entertaining;

the idea that itís necessary to know as much as possible about as many
things as possible, rather than limit what we know about in order to have
time to act compassionately and justly;

the idea that there should be something in it "for me" to
justify my involvement in something;

the idea that struggle and adversity are bad and should be avoided or
got out of as soon as possible;

the idea that most of lifeís problems can be solved by buying or acquiring
something to fix it - oneís life will therefore be better the more one
can buy more goods or go more places.

These values are rarely addressed specifically by the Bible, but many
of the Bibleís teachings and emphases contradict and challenge them. How
does one present a gospel of loving sacrifice on media that demand that
things be entertaining?

5. The Bible gives a place of special importance to those people who
are powerless, in need, or marginalised. More than just requiring us to
remember them, the Bible actually makes our relationship and empowerment
of them the measure of our faithfulness and stewardship to God ("Whatever
you did for one of the least of these....you did it for me." (Matt
25:40)).

In this context, a courageous acceptance of the biblical view of communication
and Godís seeking and transforming justice-love turns upside down our normal
way of looking at power, ethics, organisation and communication (see, for
eg. Matt 18:1-5, Matt 19:30, Luke 1:52-53, I Cor 1:27-29, and I Cor 12:24
"God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honour to the inferior
member...").

This perspective of the central importance of the powerless challenges
all our Christian communication and proclamation. Christian preachers,
biblical scholars, theologians, writers, conference speakers, broadcasters
and Christian media organisations have immense power by having access to
opportunities for communication that others donít have. On whose behalf
do we use this power? One can get the impression on occasion that much
of the churchís communication, and much of the mass communication efforts
of Christians, are directed more towards promoting the self-interest of
the speaker, building a Christian power base, or furthering the goals of
the Christian organisation than for the purpose of serving Christ by advocating,
representing or empowering those who are silenced in their powerlessness.

To that extent, a biblical view of communication challenges and confronts
not only the content, but also the power structures, methods and motives
of mass communication, even our "Christian" mass communication.
(Though we need to note that while the Bible speaks consistently for justice
and for siding with the poor it offers little that is unambiguous about
policy and strategy for achieving it - another example of how God gives
plenty of scope to us to participate in creation-redemption by using our
imagination and initiative!)

FOR FURTHER THOUGHT

discussion starters

1. The biblical message always finds expression in a new culture by
affirming some aspects of the culture and challenging others. What aspects
of media culture do you think the biblical message affirms, and what do
you think it challenges?

2. What happens to the meaning of the message, "God loves you!"
when it is spoken by one person, edited, to a million people at once via
a book, television or radio rather than one person talking to another?

3. Do the media encourage us to believe that itís important to know
as much as possible about as many things as possible? What would be the
implications if we decided to limit the amount of things we knew about
in order to have time to do something compassionate about a fewer number
of things? How would you go about it?

4. Is entertainment contrary to Godís nature? Is too much entertainment
contrary to Godís nature? How much entertainment is too much entertainment?
Should some things be entertaining and others not entertaining?

5. What implications does Paulís statement, "God chose the weak
things of the world to shame the strong" (I Cor 1:27) have for the
way we communicate as Christians?